Local Police

WESTMINSTER - Carroll County law enforcement officials will team up with Dunkin' Donuts this week - but it has nothing to do with a doughnut delivery for officers. Local police will join with law enforcement colleagues across Maryland for the second annual Cops on Rooftops event in Westminster, raising money for Maryland Special Olympics. Maryland State Police Lt. Jim DeWees and Westminster Police Chief Jeff Spaulding will sit on the rooftop of the Westminster Dunkin' Donuts, at 576 Jermor Lane (140 Shopping Center)

Local police in Oklahoma said a Pikesville man identified as a suspect in his grandparents' deaths was unresponsive when they found him in a motel just off Interstate 40 last week. Matthew Long, 31, was scheduled to check out of the Travel Inn on historic Route 66 in Weatherford, Okla., on the morning of Sept. 11, but, when he did not leave his room, the motel's owner called police. "We found Mr. Long basically unresponsive," said Detective Todd Doyals with the Weatherford, Okla., Police Department.

A Columbia man who fled the state is in a North Carolina jail after allegedly shooting his roommate during an argument over a woman, Howard County police said yesterday. Contrary to earlier police reports that 28-year-old Rulu Ramiro Alvarez was stabbed to death Saturday night, police said Miguel Olvera, 37, shot his roommate once in the chest with a small-caliber handgun about 6:45 p.m. in their Stevens Forest Road apartment. Witnesses told detectives the men had been fighting over a woman, said Police Department spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn, adding that the investigation was conducted partly in Spanish.

A man who "managed to break free" from police custody in the parking lot of the Northeast District station near Morgan State University's campus caused university officials to issue multiple alerts to students Tuesday night, according to police. About 7 p.m., a man who had just been arrested on a warrant and was being transported by officers escaped their control in the 1900 block of Argonne Drive and ran off, according to Detective Jeremy Silbert, a police spokesman. Officers immediately began searching for the man. Silbert said he did not know the man's name or why the warrant had been issued for his arrest.

Police Blotter is a sampling of crimes from state and local police and sheriff's reports in Carroll County. Eldersburg Thefts: Six residents of Vincenza Drive reported items stolen from parked vehicles June 2. On June 1, a digital camera was reported missing from an unlocked vehicle in the 1800 block of Vincenza Drive. Finksburg Arrest: Dustin Reed Barton, 18, of the 3200 block of Murray Road, Finksburg, was arrested and charged with the Feb. 15 armed robbery of a woman in a parking lot behind the Finksburg Plaza in the 3000 block of Gamber Road, state police said.

Baltimore County is pulling out of a highly regarded statewide police training program, saying it is too costly -- even though the officer training is financed mainly with federal money. Since the county joined the Maryland Police Corps in 1997, only two recruits have come from the program to the local police department. This year, county police officials hoped to hire 10 recruits from the Corps' June graduating class, but could find only one candidate who met county standards. "They had trouble with recruiting.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court took an intensive new look yesterday at its Miranda decision and dropped hints that the famous ruling could survive, but perhaps only with deep division among the justices. After a one-hour hearing, it appeared that the future of Miranda warnings would depend on the willingness of key justices to put the 1966 ruling on a firmer legal basis. Doing so would mean that local police, as well as federal agents, would still be obliged to inform suspects of their rights to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.

On the streets, where illegal drugs are still easy to get at affordable prices, Maryland police chiefs are losing the decades-long drug war. But many departments have come to depend on drug raids to increase their operating budgets. While the drug trade still enriches the bad guys, police chiefs now also get a piece of the action. Many states, wary of overzealous police departments, require that the proceeds from seized assets be used for education or other non-police purposes. But the 1984 federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act, a turning point in America's war on drugs, is a way to get around these state laws.

This month in Washtenaw County, Mich., a right-wing militia called the Hutaree was raided by state and local police and FBI agents. Nine militia members were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder a police officer then attack that officer's funeral with improvised explosive devices. This was to be the first step in the Hutaree's plot to overthrow the U.S. government. The Hutaree is only one among a number of separatist, terrorist and hate groups that view police as their No. 1 target for attack.

CAP HAITIEN, Haiti -- The Marines of Golf Company, 2nd Platoon, never dreamed it would be this awful.They were never told of the pigs lying in the gutters or the human waste washing onto the streets. But most of all, from their vantage behind a barbed-wire barricade on 24th Street in the heart of a dirty, depressed little city, nothing could have prepared these Marines for the faces of the Haitians."I look at them, and I see a lot of grief," said Cpl. Keith Guay, 21, of Fall River, Mass. "You can see it right in the eyes.